PDF Summary:The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, by Ronald A. Heifetz
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1-Page PDF Summary of The Practice of Adaptive Leadership
There are two kinds of problems organizations face today:
- Those with known solutions that only require the application of existing knowledge and workflows to solve.
- Those with unknown solutions that require innovation, experimentation, and adaptation to survive.
In The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, leadership experts Ronald A. Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky teach you how to deal with the second kind of problem. You’ll learn how to diagnose these challenges, create effective interventions, and push your organization—and yourself—further than you ever thought possible.
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- What fixes have I tried, and how did they work? What fixes have I thought of that I haven’t tried, and why haven’t I tried them? What fixes am I avoiding even thinking about?
- Where are people running into conflict? Do they disagree about the mission or values of the group, about strategy and goals, or about tasks?
Treatment
Here are some tips for launching initiatives to address diagnosed adaptive challenges:
Tip #1: Help Other People Interpret the Challenge
Organizations, teams, and individuals often default to interpretations of problems that don’t require change or for them to take responsibility. Default interpretations aren’t always wrong, but they usually don’t capture the full picture. As an adaptive leader, part of your job is to shift people’s interpretations towards what’s most accurate, not what’s easiest to swallow. To push yourself and others to do this:
- Encourage multiple interpretations of the challenge by asking what-if questions and seeking multiple perspectives.
- Call people out if they regress to easy interpretations.
Tip #2: Harness Political Power
The more political power, particularly informal authority, you have, the less you’ll have to subvert expectations, and the safer your adaptive leadership journey will be. To increase your political clout:
- Increase your informal authority by bolstering your relationships with people, gaining credibility by achieving small successes, and helping people with their problems.
- Recruit allies by teaming up with people who will benefit from your intervention, have the same values as you, have non-conflicting interests, owe you, or have a history with you.
- Warn senior leaders about the chaos you’re about to unleash. Then, when people complain, the leaders won’t be tempted to remove you because they’re prepared for sabotage attempts.
- Empathize with the opposition and accept responsibility for casualties (people who will be harmed) by the change. This will make people less hostile and show that you’re accountable for causing them harm.
- Listen to the troublemakers (the people who are always negative, critical, and so on). They’re often irritating, but they’re also early-warning systems and they’re not afraid to ask hard questions that might help you address adaptive change.
Tip #3: Surface Conflict
Surfacing conflict is a way to reveal unarticulated and unacknowledged differences in values and points of view. It won’t be possible to solve an adaptive challenge until this information comes to light and people understand the challenge’s underlying issues. There’s an eight-step process to surfacing and getting through conflict:
1. Do your research on people involved in the conflict. Before bringing up the conflict, talk to all the parties involved, find out their political alignment, and develop informal authority with them using the techniques described above.
2. Set the scene. Create an agenda for the meeting in which you’ll announce the conflict and come up with rules that help people feel safe (for example, expectations of confidentiality).
3. In the meeting, invite people to state their perspectives. Ask everyone for their opinion on the adaptive challenge and to state their values.
4. State the conflict. Articulate the differences between the values everyone has just stated. This is when people will start to get uncomfortable because they realize conflict exists and someone will lose. If the participants try to avoid conflict, keep it at the forefront. Regularly remind people what you’re all trying to do by working through the conflict—make a necessary adaptive change for the better.
5. Encourage reflection on loss. Ask everyone to think about how the losses they and others might suffer will affect them and the people they represent. You can give them anywhere between hours and months to reflect on and come to terms with their losses.
6. Establish experiments. With the help of the group, come up with experiments for both managing the adaptive change and for handling casualties.
7. Set up peer consulting. Parties should share what they learn from experimenting so they can learn from each other’s difficulties. The goal is to get everyone working together, regardless of which side of the conflict they were originally on.
8. Don’t judge people for their reasons for ultimately agreeing to your initiative. Your goal is to make an adaptive change, not to make everyone pure of heart—it doesn’t matter if someone only supports your initiative for selfish reasons (Shortform example: The change harms an enemy).
Tip #4: Develop and Launch Effective Interventions
For the best chances at success, interventions should be:
- Clearly related to your interpretation. What you’re proposing must be relevant to the challenge at hand, as you’ve identified it.
- Purpose-serving. Your intervention must further the group interest.
- Unpredictable. Develop interventions that are outside your current skill set. If you always respond in the same way, people will be able to predict you and head off your efforts. (Shortform example: If, in every situation, you most value environmental protection, people can attack your change initiatives by bringing up the environmental consequences of them, knowing that this will make you doubt your initiative.)
- Experimental. Remember that addressing adaptive challenges requires openness to new ideas. You should commit to interventions while you’re carrying them out, but if they fail, be open to trying something new.
There’s a six-step launching process for interventions, and you can complete the steps individually or together in sequential order:
1. Always keep the big picture in mind. Even after you’ve started acting, maintain your diagnostic mindset so you can keep a clear head, continue to look at the situation objectively, and change course if necessary.
2. Assess how widespread the urgency to change is within the organization. If only one group is ready to deal with an adaptive challenge, your first step will be to make the issue urgent throughout the organization.
3. Decide how to frame and state your intervention. Clearly communicate the course of action and why it’s important. It must resonate with other people’s points of view, not yours, and inspire them. Use whatever mix of facts and emotions will connect to your group’s value. For example, Martin Luther King Jr. framed his dream of equality within the context of the American dream.
4. Relinquish control. Once you’ve set off an intervention, let other people discuss and change it. This creates space for other people to participate and become more invested in it.
5. Use the factions within your team as a proxy for organizational factions. As an intervention gains momentum, some people will engage with it and modify it, and others will resist it. Notice who in your team falls into each group and predict how this reflects the actions of the factions in the whole organization so you can start addressing potential resistance.
6. Keep people focused. Because adaptive work is uncomfortable, people will look for ways to avoid it at all stages of the process. Encourage them to stay on-task by (politely) calling them on work-avoidance measures like changing the subject or making a joke to defuse tension.
Tip #5: Do Regular Emotional Maintenance
Since addressing adaptive challenges is a long, experimental process, at points, people (including you) might be tempted to give up. To maintain your momentum:
- Remember your purpose. You and your organization have an important reason for enduring adaptive change—remind people of it. For example, you might create a physical, public symbol of purpose (such as a photo of someone you’re trying to help by making the change) that people encounter every day.
- Inspire people. Help them see that even though things are rough during adaptive change, a better future is possible. For example, you might express your own emotions during a speech so people see how much the adaptive challenge affects you too.
- Take care of yourself. Because you’re the leader of adaptive change, if something happens to you, the intervention might fail. To keep yourself healthy, build relationships outside of work, eat well, exercise, sleep well, and practice rituals that renew your energy and mental resources (for example, take long walks).
Build an Adaptive Culture
In the previous sections, you learned how to tackle specific adaptive challenges. Now, we’ll look at how to increase your organization’s general adaptive abilities by building an adaptable culture. Here are five qualities of an adaptive organization:
1. People acknowledge problems. Everyone is allowed and even encouraged to bring up problems and ask uncomfortable questions, even of senior leaders. As a result, these organizations catch problems early, before they spiral into disasters, and adapt to solve them.
- For example, Intel is an adaptive company, and it’s common for the leaders of meetings to openly ask about elephants in the room. Then, the company can address them early.
To develop this quality at your organization:
- Lead by example. If you, as a leader, regularly acknowledge uncomfortable problems, other people will start doing it too.
- Encourage troublemakers. Contrarians aren’t afraid to ask hard questions or bring up uncomfortable problems.
2. People care about the whole organization. People still have job titles and reporting relationships, but they also feel responsible for the whole organization’s future, not just their own. This aids adaptability because adaptation requires working together across departmental lines.
- For example, Toyota is adaptive. One aspect of their company culture that encourages organization-level investment is that assembly line workers are expected to stop the line if they notice an issue that’s outside the scope of their formal role.
3. People use their brains. People are open to changing their opinions if they get new information, and people at the lower levels of the organizational chart are encouraged to come up with ideas and make decisions. The more brain power an organization can harness, the higher its capacity for adaptation. To develop this quality at your organization:
- Only do the things that no one else can do. Whenever you have to do a task or make a decision, if someone else could do it, let them.
- Tell your people that you don’t always know what to do. This forces them to pitch in.
4. People develop leaders. Hiring talented people and putting them in appropriate positions is one of the best ways to develop adaptability because a common growth limitation is the lack of good leaders. To develop leaders:
- Prepare individual professional development programs as well as regular debriefings on real-life leadership challenges.
- Make leadership training daily and part of on-the-job supervision.
- Create clear succession paths. Determine who can replace (and ideally surpass) you. Focus on their development and train them to do so while you’re still around.
5. People are committed to learning. Everyone in the organization admits there are gaps in their knowledge and takes steps to close them. Openness to learning is an ingredient for adaptability. To encourage a commitment to learning:
- Ask people at all levels of the organization to regularly reflect on adaptive change. This will help them get used to seeking out information.
- Encourage low-cost, high-learning experimentation. (Shortform example: You might try running two ads at once with different headlines and see which one performs better.) Run multiple experiments at once and reward the people who carry them out. This will help you and your organization learn quickly because it gives you lots of data about what works and what doesn’t.
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PDF Summary Part 1: What Is Adaptive Leadership? | Chapter 1: Backgrounder
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- Their qualities
- The key activities involved in facing them
- What will motivate you to address them
- Four tips for addressing them with adaptive leadership
The Qualities of Adaptive Challenges
Adaptive challenges have the following qualities:
Quality #1: They include an element of loss. Like biological adaptation, some things have to be left behind for things to change, but much will still be retained.
- (Shortform biological example: A white moth might evolve into a brown one (the moth loses a color it may have liked), but not into a unicorn (the moth’s core being is retained)).
- (Shortform business example: A struggling advertising firm might need to drop some existing clients to free up resources to take on new, more profitable clients. However, the firm doesn’t have to drop all its existing clients, change its staff, or change its industry.)
Quality #2: They include a human element. Problems are created by people, so everyone involved with the challenge will need to change.
- (Shortform example: If a call center’s adaptive challenge is customer dissatisfaction because the existing phone system keeps dropping calls, the people who...
PDF Summary Part 2: Diagnosis | Chapter 2: Assess the Organization
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- (Shortform example: If a company gives awards to individuals for individual performance, then everyone will be most concerned about themselves. If a company gives awards to teams for their best experiment or biggest mistake, then people will be motivated to work together and take risks.)
If your organization’s structure encourages activities that support adaptive leadership, your organization likely has higher adaptive capabilities.
Characteristic #3: Culture
The third characteristic that informs adaptability is culture—the collection of stories, unwritten rules, and conventions that govern people’s behavior. Culture is made up of four elements and all of them affect an organization’s capacity to adapt:
Element #1: Mythos
Mythos is the collection of jokes and stories that reinforce an organization’s important ideas and help people understand their surroundings. Most companies’ mythos includes stories that cover:
- The reasons people, especially executives, are fired
- Public disagreements with an authority figure
- The most memorable events of office parties
- The most memorable events of off-sites
- How the longest-standing employees...
PDF Summary Chapter 3: Assess Yourself
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Characteristic #2: Psychology
Your psychology is the combination of factors, including your genetics, culture, and childhood experiences, that shape your identity and perspective.
You respond to your surroundings based on your psychology—you’re always influenced by your circumstances and past. However, once you accept that you’re subject to influence, that’s actually when your will is most free because you can see the forces acting on you and choose how to react, rather than have your instincts take over.
- For example, if you’re unknowingly conflict-averse, you back off whenever a conversation escalates. If you’re aware of this aversion, you can recognize the instinct to back off and choose your reaction instead.
The most challenging kinds of influences are triggers—stimuli that provoke a disproportionately large reaction. There are two types of triggers to be especially mindful of:
1. Unfilled needs. Everyone needs three things: influence, affirmation, and love. A lack of any one can trigger you into a variety of unhelpful behavior.
- For example, you might have an affair with one of your colleagues if you’re lacking love.
**2....
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Learn more about our summaries →PDF Summary Chapter 4: Assess the Challenge
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Question #1: Does the Problem Fall Into Any of the Adaptive Problem Archetypes?
Check if the problem falls into any of the four common adaptive problem archetypes:
Archetype #1: Contradiction Between Words and Actions
A contradiction between words and actions is a gap between what a person or organization claims to value and what she or it actually does.
- For example, during the civil rights movement, many Americans spoke about valuing equal opportunity but didn’t challenge segregation when they encountered it in daily life. It took Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech to force them to see the contradiction between their values and actions and to acknowledge that they would have to change to close the gap.
Archetype #2: Conflicting Priorities
This archetype is the presence of conflicting priorities—in other words, mutually exclusive commitments.
- For example, a start-up might need employees to work long hours to get off the ground but also value its employees’ work-life balance and want them to be able to go home and spend time with their families. It’s not possible for employees to both work long hours and go home early, so...
PDF Summary Part 3: Treatment | Chapter 5: Interpretations
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People’s interpretations usually need to shift in the following three directions:
Direction #1: Technical to adaptive. Teach everyone at your organization the difference between technical and adaptive challenges so that they realize the different types require different solutions. This will help them understand:
- That when you’re giving orders, it’s because the problem is technical, not because you’re a dictator
- That when you’re asking questions and experimenting, it’s because the problem is adaptive, not because you’re wishy-washy
Direction #2: Benevolent to conflict-laden. Once people understand what adaptive challenges are, they’ll start to understand that they inherently involve loss and there’s no point in avoiding it—what they need to do is acknowledge conflicts, assess which losses are acceptable, and then move forward.
Direction #3: Personal to organizational. Problems are usually greater than one person is experiencing—there’s something about the system (that needs to be adapted) that allows them to persist. (For example, the fact that you have to deal with an underperforming employee might be because the organization’s culture protects...
PDF Summary Chapter 6: Harness Political Power
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- Unpack your emotions regarding authority figures so you can handle them more easily. Most of us have had both good and bad experiences with authority by the time we enter the workforce, and the bad past experiences can taint our relationships with our present authority figures (unless we move past them). Often, we’ll respond to authority figures unhelpfully by meekly following orders, rebelling, or avoiding them. (Shortform example: If you found it hard to stand up to your parents, you might find it equally hard to stand up to your boss.)
- See the whole picture. When you realize how complicated authority is, you’re likely to have more empathy for authority figures and a better idea of how to manage them.
Technique #2: Recruit Allies
Before you announce your change initiative, whether that’s a formal announcement or just bringing up the idea in a meeting, you should recruit allies to support you. You especially need allies when you’re dealing with a group of more than 20 people because the political relationships will be complicated and you won’t be able to manage them by yourself.
Potential allies are:
- People who will benefit from your...
PDF Summary Chapter 7: Surface Conflict
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3. In the meeting, invite people to state their perspectives. Ask everyone for their opinion on the adaptive challenge and to state their values.
4. State the conflict. Articulate the differences between the values everyone has just stated. This is when people will start to get uncomfortable because they realize losses are inevitable. If they try to avoid conflict, keep it at the forefront by reminding them what you’re all trying to do—make a necessary adaptive change for the better.
Use whatever communication style is appropriate when addressing the conflict. If your natural communication style isn’t appropriate when dealing with a particular person, use a different one.
- For example, if you’re normally calm but you need to yell at someone to keep them in the room, do it.
5. Encourage reflection on loss. Ask everyone to think about how the losses they might suffer, and others might suffer, will affect them and their constituents. Ask how everyone can respond to the losses. You can give them anywhere between hours and months to reflect on and come to terms with their losses.
6. Establish experiments. With the help of the group, come up with...
PDF Summary Chapter 8: Develop Effective Interventions and Change Initiatives
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- Conduct long experiments. These experiments can have objectives, milestones, data collection, and evaluations.
- Slowly increase the size of your risks to build your tolerance. If you’re currently comfortable launching initiatives with a 50-50 chance of success, try a 45-55 risk. To find the courage to do this, remember why you’re doing it—you have an important purpose.
While initiatives need to be experimental, you don’t necessarily need to (and in some cases, shouldn’t) loudly announce this aspect of them. If you’re a senior leader, people expect clear directions and certainty. Your initiative’s lack of rock-solidness may make them uncomfortable, especially if the running of the experiment involves losses that may not be tempered with gains.
You should initially call your experiment a “solution,” not an experiment, if it meets one of these two criteria:
1. You don’t think people will support it.
2. Your organization is in a state of emergency.
- For example, when a British battalion was trapped between enemy soldiers and a minefield, one soldier told the others he knew the way through the minefield. He didn’t actually know the way, but he knew if he...
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PDF Summary Chapter 9: Maintain Purpose
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Technique #2: Reconcile Organizational Purposes
Everyone in your organization holds purposes, and they may not all be the same. Figuring out how these purposes all fit together will prevent them from conflicting with each other as you tackle adaptive change.
Reconciling purposes can be uncomfortable—giving ground feels disloyal to the purpose—but your only other choices are to keep quiet about your purpose (and make no change) or leave the organization for one that shares the same purpose.
Here are the steps to reconciling purposes:
1. Determine other people’s purposes. To do this, consider the organization from their perspective—what are their priorities?
2. Share your purposes concretely and specifically. Observe how everyone else reacts.
3. Reconcile. Tweak your purpose so it better matches up with everyone else’s. (This isn’t abandoning what you stand for; it’s a way of getting things done). You might:
- Move in a more roundabout way towards your purpose. For example, a car company’s environment manager’s purpose is to develop an emissions-free vehicle. She may have to additionally embrace the purpose of profit so that the company can stay...
PDF Summary Chapter 10: Maintain Emotional Commitment
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2. Don’t hold back as much as you usually would. When you start to feel emotion, don’t suppress it, let it show.
3. Keep functioning through the emotion. (For example, if your voice starts to break from emotion, keep talking.) Don’t suppress the emotion or run—finish your speech while also displaying the emotion. This leads by example—it shows everyone who’s listening that it’s fine to feel emotion and it’s possible to get things done even while in its throes.
- For example, after 9/11, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani spoke openly about his emotions, which helped him connect with people, but he wasn’t so overwhelmed that he was incapacitated.
4. Use your voice and speech patterns effectively. When you’re delivering an emotionally difficult message, pause more often than usual to give people time to process it. When people are in conflict, speak with a calming tone to lower the intensity, and when people are unmoved, speak more loudly and expressively to raise it.
Your default tone of voice is usually determined by your culture and environment. For example, in some cultures, people in leadership positions speak dispassionately and use more statements than...
PDF Summary Chapter 11: Engage in Self-Care
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- For example, if you get affirmation from your family, you won’t need to try to get it from your coworkers. If you became reliant on their affirmation, they would have power over you.
Technique #3: Join Multiple Communities
The third technique is to join communities (for instance, a hobby group or a religious community). This is an effective method of self-care because:
- It creates boundaries between work and your personal life. Adaptive change is a massive, perpetually unfinished effort. If you don’t have other things to do besides it, it might consume you.
- It helps you learn new skills you can translate to solving your adaptive challenges.
Technique #4: Take Care of Your Body
The next technique is to take care of yourself physically. While you might not feel the physical effects of stress (inherent to adaptive challenges) while you’re fuelled with purpose and in the middle of an intervention, it’s still weighing on you. Stressful moments are when it’s most important to exercise, sleep, and eat well.
Technique #5: Create Safe Spaces (Physical or Mental)
The fifth technique is to **regularly get some distance from the conflicts...
PDF Summary Chapter 12: Overcome Five Fears
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- (Shortform example: If your ancestors were very religious but you need to walk away from this loyalty, you might give away any of their religious mementos you’d been keeping.)
3. Remember what you’re keeping. You’re not abandoning all of your loyalties, or even any of them—just the parts of them that are no longer suited to your current environment. If people accuse you of being a traitor, remember that you’re doing your best to keep as much as you can.
Fear #2: Incompetence
The second fear is of incompetence, which is unavoidable when tackling adaptive challenges—to change, you have to be working beyond your comfort zone and area of expertise. While necessary, incompetence can be uncomfortable for both you and your authorizers—most people don’t like feeling or appearing inept, and most authorizers don’t want to see the leaders they trust adrift.
The best way to get through fear of incompetence is to practice displaying your ineptitude:
1. Flat-out tell people what you don’t know or explain that you’re trying a new role you’re untrained for. This will help reduce their fear because they understand the situation better.
**2. Put yourself in...
PDF Summary Part 4: Adaptive Organizations | Chapter 13: Build an Adaptable Culture
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- Encourage troublemakers. See Technique #4 in Chapter 6 for more details.
Quality #2: People Care About the Whole Organization
The second quality of adaptive organizations is that people are invested in the well-being and future of the entire organization, not just that of their team and department. This aids adaptability because adaptation requires working together across departmental lines.
Here are some signs that people care about the whole organization:
- People discuss things outside of their area at meetings.
- Compensation structures prioritize the company’s performance rather than a team’s or individual’s.
- If one department encounters a complicated problem, other department heads consider it something they need to address too.
- Departments share people and resources.
- People low in the organizational chart have company-related concerns.
- People share their knowledge across the whole organization.
- People in leadership positions have worked in a variety of the organization’s departments.
- People “job shadow”—they follow their coworkers around to learn what their workdays are like and take the helpful techniques they learn back...